A not so fun afternoon dealing with customer service at American Airlines and Verizon

Posted on April 15, 2011 by markkolier

Everyone I know that flies a lot has their own horror stories to tell. Everyone that has a mobile phone or mobile broadband service has complained about their carrier. While my experiences with American Airlines and Verizon yesterday would not necessarily fall under the ‘horror story’ category, they did illustrate how not to handle a customer.

Our flight back to LaGuardia from Raleigh, NC started out innocently enough (I was with our Executive VP and Creative Director Nader Ashway). We were seated and ready to go when an announcement from the cockpit informed us that there were mechanical difficulties with the aircraft and they were going to try to fix it but we would be better off getting off the plane and waiting in the gate area.

We immediately got on the long line to find out what were our options for other flights to LaGuardia. Note – when you sit near the back of even a small aircraft it becomes a bad thing since you end up with fewer options. We had not considered this when booking. We will next time. By the time we got to the counter our flight had been fully cancelled and our options were –standby list on two later flights and a ‘guaranteed’ seat on the flight to LaGuardia that was scheduled to leave four hours after our original flight. There were few if any announcements in the gate area informing displaced passengers of what was going on.

American blew an opportunity to make a little hay out of adversity. All of us know that sometimes planes have equipment problems and safety first must be the #1 policy. But the communication was so non-existent that I could simply not believe it. I booked electronically and American Airlines has my mobile number, my email and they have to know what happens to any passenger at any given moment. Not one communication have I received from American Airlines – nearly 24 hours later!

How about the idea of offering all displaced passengers complimentary access to the Admiral’s Club until they could be rebooked? For people that have never been in that club it might even convince them to join. Talk about a missed opportunity. For those that have been in there at least they would feel acknowledged that a problem (not weather related) occurred and American Airlines at least tried to do what they could. Offering me a seat on a flight four hours later did nothing to serve this customer.

Only because I am a glutton for punishment I then decided to use the time to repair my Verizon wireless modem card that had been acting up. I called the number and a helpful woman in Georgia named Angela tried to help me get the card back up and working since I had money on the card and wanted to get online.

After rebooting my machine two times and trying everything else under the sun for 45 minutes (draining my mobile phone battery in the process), Angela told me that she needed to fill out a ‘trouble ticket’ with a case number. And it would ‘only’ take 5-10 minutes. What? How does this serve me – the customer? I already had been dragged through a series of protocols that simply established that Verizon’s modem was defective. Now I have to wait for them to fill out a trouble ticket? But having invested 50 minutes into the call I was compelled to wait and see it through. At the close of the call (I was pushing hard to get off the phone to save what little battery I had left), I was told I would get a SMS text message with the ‘trouble ticket’ information. You guessed it. I am still waiting for that text and my mobile card still does not work.

Verizon has that age-old message at the start of a service call – ‘This call may be monitored for customer service”. I don’t think that they are really listening at all do you?

Posted in Best business practices, Communication, Customer Experiences, Marketing stuff | Tagged , , , , | 5 Comments

Why not a free Amazon Kindle?

Posted on April 14, 2011 by markkolier

As a sometime frustrated original Kindle owner (mainly due to the fact that they have never reached out to me since I paid the $ 399 for the now dinosaur-like 1st edition) ,the news this week http://on.wsj.com/i9NHe2 that Amazon has come up with an even less expensive option by offering an advertising-supported Kindle made me even more annoyed. The same exact Kindle currently on sale for $ 139 will now be available for $ 114 with ads popping up on the home page but not during the ‘reading’ experience.

The idea itself is both interesting and perhaps even overdue. What surprised me is the small difference between the price for a Kindle with and without ads. Keep in mind that the Kindle owner can turn off the Wi-Fi so that ads will not be served and you can read on your Kindle without ads except when you go the Kindle store to buy something.

I take it as some type of return salvo against Apple’s iPad 2 which still has A T & T Wireless customers still lining up in the streets in order to try to get one. From the article in the Wall Street Journal from April 12th by Stu Wood – ‘Some in publishing suggested that the new lower price is a savvy move.’ “People won’t hesitate to buy the cheaper device because advertising is everywhere we look,” said Richard Curtis, a New York literary agent and digital book publisher. “People will think it’s a good trade-off.” And if they actually look at the ads, so much the better for the advertisers and Amazon”.

But only a $ 25 discount? Amazon is said to have sold more than 5 million Kindles in 2010 alone. If half that universe purchased an ad supported Kindle in 2011 that would mean a universe of 2,500,000 for which ads could be served. It seems to me that even with modest projections the lifetime value of the purchasing consumer would be worth far more than a measly $ 25 discount.

If Amazon truly wants to make makers of other E-readers and tablets take notice, the price of an advertising-supported Kindle should come down even more – how about $ 49? How about free with the purchase of 10 or more books from the Kindle Store?

Or how about a free Kindle if the customer buys an advertising-supported Kindle and also agrees to purchase 10 books from the Kindle store over a defined time period? That’s how Columbia House Record Clubs, BMG Records and Book of the Month did it for years. Only this time the books are delivered electronically so there is no cost for shipping and handling.

How about it – would you like a free Amazon Kindle with ads and a promise to buy a certain number of books over a certain period of time?

Posted in Customer Experiences, Marketing stuff | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | 2 Comments

How Citi Field’s Acela Club turned around a potentially terrible customer experience

Posted on April 11, 2011 by markkolier

Friday afternoon was opening day at CitiField for my beloved New York Mets or as Steve Somers of WFAN coined it – the Wilponzi’s. Ouch. It was a cold and dreary day like many days in early April at baseball parks in the northern climes. My ticket partners and I made a reservation at the Acela Club where we’ve eaten a number of times since it opened with the new stadium in 2009.

Arriving intentionally a bit early at 2PM for our 2:15 PM reservation, we knew that there was a 3:45 PM reservation behind us so we would have to clear out by then – first pitch was scheduled for 4:10PM. The line outside the restaurant was surprisingly long. None of us could figure out why. This began an odyssey that defied explanation for much of the afternoon. It ended well but only due to a savvy restaurateur in Drew Nieporent of Myriad Restaurant Group (Tribeca Grill, Nobu, Corton among others if you don’t know), who in addition to being on the scene realized that things were not going smoothly at all.

At $ 48 prix fix a meal at the Acela Club is not cheap. But you do get a lot for the money mainly due to the impressive salad and sandwich bar that has more high quality food than you could eat even if you didn’t eat an entrée. (The truffle macaroni and cheese is addictive).

Once we were seated, the drinks we ordered took 20 minutes to arrive. And our server was nowhere in sight for those 20 minutes of waiting. One of our partners cryptically mentioned to another server that we actually were at the stadium to watch a ball game “today”. Our meals did not arrive until well after 3:15. A couple of times we were visited by a host who offered us a free drink (we declined) and apologies for the slow service which did show that the staff was aware that things were not going well.

Once the meals did arrive the food as always was good. However at that point there was sincere doubt that we might return again – first pitch was 10 minutes away and it was long past 3:45. We finished up our meals and one of the hosts came over and told us that they were sorry for the long wait and the restaurant was going to pick up our meals.

Wow. And who said there was no such thing as a free lunch? None of us expected that but we were extremely pleased with the result. And yes we will be going back to the Acela club again soon but we might not have had they not come in and made amends.

On the way out I passed Drew (whom I have met a couple of times but do not know well at all) who was both on the phone and surveying the proceedings. I mentioned to him that it was a tough day and he more than agreed saying they totally messed it up – surprising candor from one of New York’s premiere restaurateurs. But I also told him that in the end they got it right by doing the unexpected.

Everyone should think about doing the unexpected when you know your customer has a bad experience in order try to make it right. Anyone can have a bad day. It’s what you do to respond that sets your company apart.

Do you have any good stories on successful resolution to a potential bad customer experience?

Posted in Best business practices, Customer Experiences | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | 4 Comments

Food coloring as marketing – would you eat a gray pickle?

Posted on April 8, 2011 by markkolier

</a

First it was an article in the March 30th New York Times http://nyti.ms/e2p6Ry indicating that the F.D.A. Panel is going to consider warnings for artificial food colorings. There is some evidence that food coloring is linked to Attention Deficit Disorder (ADD). This was followed on April 2nd with an article in the same newspaper entitled ‘Colorless Food? We Blanch” http://nyti.ms/hJSjJ4.

It made me realize that food coloring is nothing more than marketing. After all who would want to eat a grey pickle? From Gardiner Harris’ article – “Without the artificial coloring FD&C Yellow No. 6, Cheetos Crunchy Cheese Flavored Snacks would look like the shriveled larvae of a large insect. Not surprisingly, in taste tests, people derived little pleasure from eating them. Their fingers did not turn orange. And their brains did not register much cheese flavor, even though the Cheetos tasted just as they did with food coloring.”

“People ranked the taste as bland and said that they weren’t much fun to eat,” said Brian Wansink, a professor at Cornell University and director of the university’s Food and Brand Lab.

Naked Cheetos would not seem to have much commercial future. Nor might some brands of pickles. The pickling process turns them an unappetizing gray. Dye is responsible for their robust green. Gummi worms without artificial coloring would look, like, well, muddily translucent worms. Jell-O would emerge out of the refrigerator a watery tan.”

Yum right? I was able to handle the fact that Cheetos were artificially colored and flavored and whatever else makes a Cheeto (that word looks very odd in singular form to me), the epitome of ersatz food), but pickles? Cucumbers are green so somehow I extrapolated that pickles should be green. I bet I am not alone there.

Inherently we all know that food coloring is a part of many of the processed foods we Americans have come to love. But what if all the processed foods Americans love to eat were not artificially colored? Would Americans (and people all around the world) become less fat?.

It’s no secret that color (and odor of course) is critical in making food appear appetizing. That goes for natural and unnatural foods alike. But marketing folks have to acknowledge that putting food coloring in processed foods is nothing other than advertising and salesmanship. I never really thought about it that way before.

The article did note that while there were natural colorings, they were “not as bright, cheap, or stable, as artificial colorings, which can remain vibrant years.” Now there’s a comforting thought.

Some food companies have expanded their processed-product offerings to include foods without artificial colorings. You can now buy Kool-Aid Invisible, http://bit.ly/hSNq8A for instance, and Kraft Macaroni and Cheese Organic White Cheddar http://bit.ly/et0CPX. Some grocery chains, including Whole Foods Market and Trader Joe’s, refuse to sell foods with artificial coloring.

Talk about your processed foods, this week Procter & Gamble sold the last of its food products – Pringles Potato Chips to Diamond foods for $ 2.3 billion. Pringles are made from potatoes that are cooked, mashed, dehydrated, and made into a dough. They are then cut out, shaped, and dried. This enables them to stay crispy and not greasy and to keep their saddle shape in the can! (At least according to the website cha-cha). Oh and BTW they are amazingly tasty if I say so myself.

In the meantime while I am not a regular consumer of Cheetos or Kool-Aid, I do like a pickle now and again with my sandwich, but every time I eat one from now on I will think about the color and how it got to be that way.

I’m not saying that food coloring should be banned. But we should all be a little more aware that processed food is truly unnatural.

Or maybe people simply don’t care?

Posted in Customer Experiences, Marketing stuff | Tagged , , , , , , , , | 1 Comment

Brand Advertising scores with Bud Light’s campaign ‘Here We Go’

Posted on April 6, 2011 by markkolier

One thing advertising and marketing folk seem to like to do is tear down other people’s work. At times I am no different. Often I find myself watching a television spot or see a print ad and think to myself – “C’mon Man – we could do better than that!” I will admit that I have absolutely no certainty of what the mission was, or how involved the client might have been in the creative process. And clients do have a propensity for sticking their noses in the creative process – after all it is their money.

Brand oriented spots in particular can leave me shaking my head going – huh? What was that about? And there are times when I will watch a well made TV spot and then have no recollection of who the client was immediately after!

While I am not a drinker of Bud Light the ‘Here We Go’ campaign is omnipresent to anyone that watches sporting events on TV. The just completed NCAA basketball tournament was a prime example. A good brand spot gets into your head and I again realized this when I was watching the third set of the Rafael Nadal – Novak Djokovic men’s tennis final from the Sony Ericsson tournament this past Sunday afternoon.

As the two players tied 6-6 in the 3rd set a tiebreaker was imminent and the commentator said – ‘Here We Go’. I immediately thought of Bud Light. How did they get to own that phrase? I don’t even drink the beer but the brand/word association was powerful.

Think about how often you hear the phrase ‘Here We Go’. I think fans of sports on television where Bud Light is running those spots will have no choice but to associate the phrase and the beer. That’s the whole point isn’t it?

And the bonus is that Bud Light is creating new words for the lexicon. Where else have you ever heard the term ‘shramplicate’? But I bet in the context of the ad http://bit.ly/eF0125 you know what they mean.

Good branded television spots don’t have to be great demonstrations of artistic advertising – and the Bud Light campaign is a prime example of that. But campaigns do have to persuade and be memorable. I think the ‘Here We Go’ campaign achieves that.

Do you?

Posted in Marketing stuff, Media | Tagged , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Social Security – are you counting on it?

Posted on April 4, 2011 by markkolier

An article in this morning’s Wall Street Journal highlighted http://on.wsj.com/hW9aGd something I (and many people like me) have been thinking for a long time. Although we’ve been paying into the Social Security program for more than 30 years (hey we were working in our teenage years!), there is a real possibility that Social Security will not be available for today’s fifty year olds until their mid or late seventies – if at all.

Recently I checked on my own projected SSA benefit at the .gov website http://1.usa.gov/fC1VlM that shows what one would take out on a monthly basis. For me the amount would not be insubstantial but it’s still a very long time before I could qualify to take the maximum benefit (most people will defer to that number in the hope they won’t need to reduce their ‘benefit’ by taking it earlier with penalties).

I realize that the minimum age for social security will continue to increase. The intellectual part of me knows that this has to happen in order for the system to remain solvent as long as possible. But that does very little for those people who are counting on Social Security as a substantial part of their ‘retirement’ income.

My particular generation may well have the distinction of paying into the Social Security system longer than any previous generation (since the minimum age is continually rising) and then have nothing left to take out when our time comes.

United States politicians are ‘aware’ of the problems and issues. President Obama and all of his recent predecessors have talked about problems with the future of the Social Security program. All would like you to believe that they will figure out a way for Social Security to be there for Americans. Given the current national debt problems I don’t see how Social Security can last twenty years without dramatic changes – changes that heretofore have been deemed anathema.

I don’t wish to be the dark cloud of doom on a spring Monday morning. But being a realist, has me thinking that my wife and I had best not plan for Social Security to ‘supplement’ (wasn’t that the original idea behind it in the first place?), our retirement income.

Of course I’m not even thinking about retirement. And while that does not bother me it’s a good thing since I think we’ll be working for many years to come. It’s also a good thing that I like what I do and generally enjoy working. But that’s hardly the case for many other people and there is bound to be some serious resentment on the part of people counting on Social Security when they realize it either is not going to be there until age 77+ if at all.

We’ve all been paying into the Social Security system. Are you counting on Social Security to be there when your turn comes?

Posted in Living in the World Today | Tagged , , , , , | 4 Comments

Trending on Twitter – do you ever actually look at the list?

Posted on April 1, 2011 by markkolier

When I view the home page on Twitter I always take a peek at what topics are ‘trending’. It’s often the quickest way to find out what people are talking about. Of course what people talk about can be amazingly trivial and uninteresting.

Take a look. Right now I just peeked and saw Chad Pennington (a Quarterback for the Miami Dolphins), apparently tore his ACL playing off-season basketball. One comment on the oft-injured QB was that even without football he can find a way to put himself on injured reserve. Earlier this week there was a trending topic ‘RIP Jackie Chan’. I took a quick scroll down the list and many people were aghast that the news (totally untrue) was shocking but most people did not believe it.

GoDaddy’s CEO Bob Parsons was also a trending topic today – he posted a video of he and some team members on safari in Africa shooting and killing an elephant, the elephant was alleged to have been trampling a sorghum field thus impoverishing local farmers and causing starvation. This will no doubt be all over the news in the next few days with people calling for boycotts of GoDaddy.com.

What makes a trending topic? Obviously the things that people are tweeting about. And (by some counts) with more than 100 million Twitter users that’s a pretty large sample (granted most users actually tweet rarely). So what makes a trending topic is having a substantial number of people Tweet about something that they find interesting and want their followers to see. You can select trending topics to be segmented by country, or even by city. Take a look at what’s trending in Brazil or Turkey for example.

Not all of the trending topics are trivial however. I first saw the news of the tsunami in Japan as a trending topic on Twitter. I immediately searched for more news. The speed at which people tweet an event is mind-boggling at times. I can’t imagine being that plugged into everything that is going on that I would be able to (or want to) be an early tweeter of what will be a trending event.

At the same time trending topics on Twitter do act as a representation of some collective consciousness of what people are thinking about. I find that very interesting and I am betting it will get even more interesting as more people jump into the Tweetstream.

Non-social media users like to make fun of Twitter and readily admit that they don’t get it, and don’t have time for what they consider to be nonsense. As a marketing guy I find the maturation of Twitter and Twitterites (it would be good to settle on one name for those that Tweet I admit) to be a good study of the way human beings interact as well as how communications are evolving.

And I am somewhat relieved but sad to learn that they caught the missing Bronx Zoo Cobra – who which by the way has more than 200,000 followers. And many of the tweets from the @bronxzoocobra were both clever and hilarious. It’s good to laugh at work sometimes.

Posted in Communication, Social Media | Tagged , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Amazon’s music locker – a good idea that that record labels and publishers want to mess up

Posted on March 30, 2011 by markkolier

Yesterday Amazon.com introduced the concept of a ‘Music Locker’. As a longtime advocate of Amazon I have been following the development of this release and was excited about its practical nature and customer-centric approach. Amazon is trying (unlike its rivals) to offer cloud access to music independent of the device being used. The music industry is not happy about this at all and is already jumping up and down screaming foul.

From an article in Tuesday’s New York Times – http://nyti.ms/f2lEbJ …The dream of these companies (like Amazon, Google, and Apple), along with many start-ups, is for people to be able to listen to their music from any computer or phone. But they have all run into the same problem: music labels and publishers would prefer that listeners buy a new copy of a song everywhere they want to listen to it.”
I don’t know about you but the idea that I should have to pay for a new copy of the song on any device that I own does not work for me – or anyone else I suspect. Are they serious? Yes there are problems with the technology’s inability to recognize whether or not a song has been purchased ‘legally’ or not. But the solution is not to throw the burden back on the purchaser to then buy it individually for whatever device on which he or she wants to listen.
One of my early careers was a musician – composer/artist. I did not have the discipline to slog day-to-day through the difficult music business. However I do recognize the effort and artistry that goes into creating music (and art or prose of any kind for that matter). Yet having people pay for individual device access to a song (or article) does not serve the artist or author – it serves the label or publisher.
There has to be a better way. I don’t believe it is incumbent upon me to come up with that better way but I will give it some thought. In the meantime I am very interested in what you think. Could you see yourself paying for individual access to music on your IPod or MP3 player, I-pad or tablet, computer, or in your automobile? Or would it just aggravate you as much as it does me?

Posted in Entertainment, Marketing stuff, Technology | Tagged , , , | 2 Comments

Will today’s teenagers be the last generation to type on a keyboard?

Posted on March 28, 2011 by markkolier

This thought has been popping up in my mind consistently over the past few years. With voice recognition technology continually improving (I admit it still has a way to go), the need to actually keystroke in words is possibly becoming less and less relevant every day.

I don’t know about you but my handwriting is terrible. Never all that good in the first place, it has devolved into a text style instantly recognizable by nobody and sometimes not even by me. I am a far better typist since I type ALL the time and dislike having to write by hand. Since I grew up even before the advent of the personal computer (I was a proud owner of an IBM Selectric back in college) typing was a vast improvement over my even then lousy handwriting.

Teenagers today impress everyone with their mind-blowing speed when SMS texting. I also notice that kids are very fast and good at typing on a keyboard as well (their spelling – well that’s another story). But what if there was really good voice recognition software and technology that worked all the time? Perhaps I will receive notes from companies like Dragon and Nuance, as well as products from Windows, Google and Apple espousing how well their products work. I’ve used a few of them from time to time and my impression is they are improving but the learning curve takes too long – that is they take too long to recognize my voice to make the proper word interpretation.

Eventually voice recognition technology will be truly high performing. And the need to actually type one’s thoughts and ideas will be reduced dramatically. There will be a much higher value put on editing since the inability to think orally (unfortunately evidenced by too many people too frequently) will allow things like term papers and white papers to be much more easily started. But the finishing will then truly be the challenge – something that writers already are well aware of. Taking all those thoughts you have that then are translated into text that you can read on the page will be exciting at first as it will seem so easy. Yet crafting something that is both interesting and concise (brevity is beautiful after all), is not as easy as it looks – even when you don’t have to physically type the words.

Part of my process for “creating content” as it is now called, is writing and editing at the same time. Even after I finish the thought process I go back and edit. And then I edit again and again. So while I welcome advancements in voice recognition technology I am so wired into typing my thoughts it will not be easy for me to adopt its usage – at least for some of the time.
Of course then there’s eye tracking which was in the news this week as articles both in Business Week http://buswk.co/hbW9QS and the New York Times http://nyti.ms/giq0eA highlighted this emerging technology

I don’t long for my old IBM Selectric, but I wonder if I could really give up typing all together. Could you?

Posted in Best business practices, Communication, Customer Experiences | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | 2 Comments

College Textbooks getting it on with Inkling

Posted on March 25, 2011 by markkolier

A business associate of mine recently moved to an interesting new startup in Silicon Valley called Inkling. The more I learn about this iPad application the more I like it – and like Adam Lashinsky’s fine March 23rd article in Fortune Magazine http://bit.ly/gG3Yhb – it makes me wish I could go back to college and use ridiculously cool tools like this to help me better appreciate things and learn more.

From Mr. Lashinky’s article: “Inkling, a San Francisco startup, recently added textbook giants McGraw-Hill (MHP) and Pearson (PSO) to its roster of investors, which includes Sequoia Capital as well as Felicis Ventures, Kapor Capital and Sherpalo Ventures.”

As a parent having one current college student already and another to enroll this fall, I am particularly sensitive to the cost of college textbooks. They were expensive when I went to college and are even more so now. Having college textbooks on an iPad (or any kind of tablet for that matter) makes all the sense in the world. Think about the many advantages of having all your college textbooks on a tablet. In fact I expect that high schools will follow suit shortly and have all of their textbooks available for tablet download –this is happening already in some places but is far from being adopted in any significant manner.

1) Less weight to haul around campus. Not only for college kids but how about that 94 lb. high school freshman whose back is being thrown out of alignment due to hauling around an Earth Science textbook, Algebra, English, Social Studies…you get the idea. Medical school students should particularly cheer the Inkling iPad application as they have to feel carrying around bricks disguised as books is way beyond getting old.

2) It’s greener by far ¬– And I will bet that you have a few old school textbooks lying around somewhere in your house or apartment – I know I have at least one that I’ve not opened since graduating and it will eventually be thrown out.

3) Web links don’t work using conventionally printed textbooks – need I say more?

4) Student’s natural curiosity can be more fully explored using a tablet – if you are using a conventionally printed textbook and want to investigate something more deeply you either have to pick up another book or volume (unlikely to say the least) or go to the web. With a tablet you are already on the web.

5) You can pay for what you need – the current model allows students to purchase chapters for $3. I suspect that model is still being tested but the ability to buy incrementally is a good idea by spreading out the cost of purchasing a textbook over a longer period of time. And we all know there are many teachers that don’t always instruct from every chapter in a textbook.

Right now Inkling is only available as an app for the iPad since the company was started by CEO Matt MacInnis who worked at Apple before founding Inkling. I expect an Android app is in the works and when RIM releases its PlayBook tablet in April one would be developed for that as well in time.
Here’s a link to a CNN Money video on the Inkling Application featuring Mr. MacInnis from last year – http://bit.ly/bcA192.

It is often joked that education is wasted on the young. Even if that’s not true I am really jealous and wish I could go back to college and have my iPad with this application in my backpack.

Wouldn’t you?

Posted in Best business practices, Customer Experiences, Technology | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment